A Jaded Life

Maria might have been the first to approach me, but she was far from the only one. After she left, I didn’t have to wait all that long for the next soul to approach me, drawn by the lure that was my house. Or maybe the lure was power and the house was simply an easily visible representation of that power, either way, it worked out like honey to lure flies. Maybe it even worked a little too well, as people seemed to wear out the rocky path to my home, though, amusingly, they made sure that nobody ever tried to enter while another was in.

One after another, all of them searching to become something more, to regain some of the freedom and comfort they had enjoyed before the world had Changed. Not that I could supply that sort of power but it was obvious that I had the power and they wanted to understand how I got it, or wanted to acquire it outright.

In some cases, I helped them to step onto the Arcane Path, guided them into the Astral River and even quietly spoke about Lady Hecate. The last was mainly to provide a counterpoint to the currently represented deities but given that I somehow received a not insignificant EXP boost whenever I managed to convert somebody was a convenient bonus. Almost as if a certain higher power had an interest in getting converts, or maybe getting converts in this place, I wasn’t sure and didn’t really care. I got my EXP, both for teaching and for converting and, amusingly, it was enough to push me up to level eighty-nine. I also gained a few skill points, Earth and Crystal for the work on the house, Astral Meditation and Mind Magic for the teaching and a few in Enchanting, though some of those had been from my earlier work.

And that was only for those who had an innate talent for magic. They needed another path but, as their lack of effort clearly demonstrated, they didn’t have an interest, or the fortitude, to traverse the Martial Path, or they would have already started their journey. It didn’t take a lot of direction to take a suitably heavy object and start bludgeoning your foes with it and that, at the end of the day, was the foundation of the Martial Path. Hit things, hard.

Similarly, they didn’t have what it took to draw divine attention. As things were, you either had to be innately gifted for divine magic, like Luna was, or you had to hold a legacy, otherwise, the deities didn’t actively show an interest in you. The local clerics might have inducted a few people but even they understood that taking in those with the best innate qualities would, ultimately, give them the best results.

So, they needed a different path. A path I was quite willing to help them on, though I wasn’t quite certain if I should consider it part of the Arcane Path or if it was a different path altogether, the Path of Monsters. While I didn’t tell them what they were signing up for, I gave them enough direction and instruction to make their way towards predetermined sides, where I would meet them. There, they would serve as test subjects for a few of my more interesting abilities and, if things went well, would become something more.

The experiments Luna and I performed on animals had worked out quite well and now, with a group of suitable human resources just stumbling into my grasp, I could see other, even more interesting, experiments in the future. What would happen if we incorporated the wildness of Lightning Magic into a human while keeping them somewhat stable with Life Magic? Could we induce affinities or, if not, would it be possible to take the smallest affinity within a human and grow it into something more? Because every human had some Astral Power, the problem was that most didn’t have enough to make something worthwhile of it. But what if I could take what they had and grow their predominant affinity, no matter how miniscule it currently was, into something powerful?

So many questions, so many experiments and so few test subjects. Hopefully, they would prove viable, just like I hoped that at least some of the experiments I had cooked up with Lia would work out. There were enough people here that losing a few of their lowest wouldn’t impair them, especially if there was a chance, though maybe a small one, that they would receive something special in return. I doubted that those in charge would agree, but they didn’t need to know what individuals came to me for.

Not that they didn’t visit, too. It seemed that, thanks to the prevalence of Divine Magic, there was a certain curiosity in regards to the Arcane, primarily elemental, Magic I wielded. Some of the tales told by the Legacies about Mundus, their personal experiences there and, maybe most importantly, the numerous threads on the forum, some of which had featured my deeds, all those diverse stories roused their interest, to say nothing of my original offer to trade enchanted goods for food.

Joshua was the first of those in charge who approached me, alongside their primary quartermaster, the one who kept track of their food supply. To my surprise, the Quartermaster, Hauke, wasn’t really interested in any of the enchanted items I had prepared but asked questions about the house and what I could do with stone, how long it would last, how hard I could make the stones, things like that. When I inquired about his reasons, he explained that one of their biggest problems at the moment was a need to grind their grains into flour. While the physical effort wasn’t difficult to produce, thanks to a plethora of system-enhanced physiques and attributes, getting the mill-mechanism to work was difficult, due to the tolerances and the material involved.

I didn’t see a problem helping with that and offered that I could shape the millstone as easily as I had shaped the house and would likely be able to make it far harder than natural rock had any right to be, though it would take a bit of time and effort, both of which I’d expect to be compensated for. From there, the negotiations began, not just for my time and effort but also for the expertise needed to create and enchant the different items they were interested in.

It took a bit of negotiating, but they eagerly traded their food and, from what I could tell, considered it a good deal. In turn, I soon noticed the fairly obvious scheme they had concocted, namely to primarily offer me fairly heavy and unwieldy supplies, like pumpkin, squash, sweet potatoes and similar crops, instead of easily storable grains like rice or corn. If I couldn’t carry off my traded goods, I’d either have to leave behind what I couldn’t carry, and trying to carry off a pumpkin the size of my torso sounded like a massive hassle, or I’d have to stay until I consumed the food they traded me. Either way, they’d win, by either reducing the price they had to pay or by slowly integrating me into their community.

Thankfully, I had my magical bags, meaning their scheme was doomed from the start but as they offered an excellent deal, ostensibly to make up for the unwieldy nature of their goods, I was happily going along with them. It truly was the essence of trade, both parties shamelessly cheating each other and taking advantage as much as possible, without stooping to truly immoral acts. Not that such acts would be all that easy, Identify was readily used on the items I offered and, in turn, on the goods they put out, allowing both parties to see exactly what they’d get.

Other than trading with them, I also learned a great deal about the community itself and quickly realised that I’d been right, there had been no coincidence involved in its formation. Well, at least not on a macro scale, there had been numerous coincidences involved on individual levels, but the reason they had all gathered in this area? That had been no coincidence, that was divinely inspired.

The initial groups moving into the area had all been led by somebody holding a legacy and travelling down the Divine Path, all of them inspired to gather as many people and supplies in their home-town as they could before moving. Those fairly large groups attracted attention from other groups, some of which had been led by other legacies, leading to them banding together and forming what was now New Dawn.

Once the village was founded, it flourished rapidly, thanks to multiple events that were just too convenient not to have been meddled with. Finding a small herd of sheep that hadn’t broken their domestication, a convenient source of water that just happened to dig its way through the mountain in a location that allowed them to irrigate their fields with ease? Those were just two out of many coincidences that allowed them to flourish as they had.

Knowing that the gods had put this settlement here, I started to look for the reason, as I doubted the gods would pick a spot on a whim. Sure, there might be some mundane reason, something as simple as that it was roughly equidistant from the various towns these people had started at, or that it had particularly fertile farmland, was easy to defend or a number of different reasons, but I doubted it was anything so mundane.

Or rather, I doubted that mundane circumstances were completely disconnected from supernatural influences, one was caused by the other. Though, whether a glacier above an Ice Nexus was caused by the Nexus or if the Nexus formed in that particular spot because of the glacier, I wasn’t sure. And, with the current state of the Change’d world, I doubted that it truly mattered, the supernatural had been dug into our world and now, we had to deal with it.

So, trying to figure out why this spot was so special and the way it was, I started to investigate the Astral River, delving deeply into it and analysing its currents, searching for meaning.